Tuesday, November 22, 2011

CANADA: Military failing to properly maintain equipment.

OTTAWA - Canada's defence department is failing to properly maintain its fleets of aircrafts, ships and land vehicles and doing only enough repairs to get by in the short-term.

And a new audit released Tuesday by the federal spending watchdog found that failing to properly maintain its military equipment has a serious impact on air, land and sea operations.

The fall report by the auditor general into the maintenance and repairs of military equipment noted the shortfall in repair funds meant work backlogs, fewer flying hours and days at sea, reduced availability of equipment for training and operations, more expensive repairs, and reduced life expectancy for its fleets.

The report also found the department was failing to track all the costs related to keeping its equipment up and running,­ and that demand for repair funds had been outstripping the budget for at least five years.

Defence spent more than $2 billion in the last fiscal year to repair its military equipment, but failed to track additional staff and overhead costs.

In a bid to address some of the longstanding oversight problems, the department said in 2001 it would fully implement a new asset management system within three years.

That completion date has now been moved to late 2013 ­- almost a decade later ­- and the auditor general's report noted it would take even more time for the system to be fully up and running.

The report also highlighted concerns related to the growing dependency by National Defence and Canadian Forces on the private sector.

The department's new contracting rules for new equipment bundles acquisition contracts with maintenance contracts.

The auditor general noted that without proper oversight, it could atrophy the military's in-house maintenance and repair skills and create a dependency on suppliers.

The military is expected to spend $60 billion on new equipment and $140 billion on maintenance and repair contracts over the next 20 years.

http://cnews.canoe.ca

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